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Most Democrats dread the prospect of a Republican takeover of the Senate, which would give both houses of Congress subpoena power over the White House and make President Barack Obama’s last two years in office an unshirted hell. But there is a case to be made that even if Republicans consolidated their power on the east end of Constitution Avenue, the party’s hard-core and nihilist caucuses would prevent them from adopting an affirmative agenda that could appeal to voters in 2016.

“When the House Republicans came to power in 2010, they ran on the economy and all these other things, and the first thing they did was abortion bills,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank. “I’m very supportive of us winning the Senate, but there’s an argument that losing the Senate is not the worst catastrophe in the world. The structural problem they have right now is they’re a congressional party, so they can’t make national party decisions.”

The GOP’s prospective 2016 field will face the same problem. For example, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, seen by many stalwarts as the perhaps the party’s best hope, would be square in the cross-hairs of the tea party wing, not least for his longstanding support for the Common Core educational curriculum, long anathema to such activists.

On questions like climate change and gay marriage, pollster McInturff said, younger voters no longer believe there is anything to argue about. He summed up their views as: “‘We wouldn’t fight about that. That’s just presumed to be true.’”

Thomas Mann, the veteran political scientist and Congress-watcher at the Brookings Institution, said that, at the moment, the Republicans are “simply not a presidential party.”

“Republicans managed to dominate the White House for a long time, and then hold on even in a period when Democrats were doing better, by avoiding this kind of extreme behavior, nominating someone like Bush, who could say the words ‘compassionate conservatism’ and ‘immigration reform,’’’ Mann said. “And because he was in the White House, Republicans in Congress didn’t give him too much trouble about it, they just didn’t do the things he wanted. They were happy to have him advance their tax cut agenda, and then when it all collapsed with Iraq and the economy, they turned on him.”

The twist, Mann said, is that Republicans almost certainly don’t even need to stake out such extreme positions to prevail this year. “The House, it’s almost a given, “ he said, “and in the Senate, it just depends on whether we get an economic tick or not.”

But a fierce debate is already underway within the GOP over whether even a Republican victory this November would be a conservative enough posture. A group coordinated by former Attorney General Edwin Meese and former Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.) convened outside Washington last week to draft a manifesto calling on the party to “recommit” itself to bedrock conservative principles — including strict opposition to illegal immigration, same-sex marriage and abortion.

The Democrats have plenty of problems of their own, beginning with how to defend the president’s signature achievement, the health care law, in the face of lingering doubts about it. The Democratic nominee in 2016 will effectively be running for a third term, and if Obama’s second ends in a stalemate with Congress and an economy that is not producing jobs at a more robust pace, he (or she) will face a tough fight. Thirty years ago, the Democrats faced bitter internal divisions between liberal and moderate wings, divisions that made it easy for them to hold onto Congress but hard to win the White House.

Now, that’s mostly the GOP’s problem.

“Given that their base is pretty distant from the center,” Tanden said, the Republicans “have this natural disadvantage, in that the decision-makers on policy are responsible more to their base than the middle. I’m almost sympathetic, because I care about national policy on the progressive side, and we just don’t have the same issues. The most pro-immigration side in our party is closer to the moderates, and to the country.”